


Run Wild

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: Number One Enemy [1]
Category: Primeval
Genre: F/M, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3211427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ross lets his imagination run wild all the time. It’s the easiest way of coping with Christine, but it comes with its own problems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run Wild

            Adam Ross hated his job. He really did. Between the paperwork, the evil bat things, and the anomalies they’d race to, never sure whether they were trying to save lives and gather intel or playing their part in some kind of twisted cat-and-mouse game with Lester, he thought he’d never loathed a posting so much. When he took order from Christine, he could no longer look her in the eye: he was afraid to see his reflection in her irises, afraid that he would see himself stepping onto a frozen lake blushed blue with the water underneath, and if he looked too closely he would see himself make a wrong step, see the ice crackle asunder under his own feet and himself falling to a death of cold and drowning. So he watched the wall and listened for the sound of the ice cracking in Christine’s voice instead, waiting, waiting for the first shifts of the ice sheets under his feet.

 

            He sometimes wondered if other people thought about these things. He knew he had too much imagination for a soldier: Captain Wilder told him so, frequently and with emphasis. But Christine was lethal, and everyone knew that; everyone feared her on some level, as he’d learnt in the few bare months he’d been working on Christine’s project. He couldn’t be out of the ordinary in imagining the horrific fates she could make his, and maybe that was enough.

 

            There was only one person who never seemed scared of her, and that was her private secretary, but Miss Wickes was professional and bloodless at all times, submissive to Christine with her eyes neutral and her clothes ill-fitting and the wrong colours for her coffee-chestnut skin. If she felt anything at all it was hard to know; she gave orders that were followed, for reasons no-one perfectly understood, she did her work better than most, she existed, but if she had a life of her own no-one knew anything of it. Adam never saw her smile, and sometimes he wondered if it was all an act, or if there really was nothing warm and human and fallible in there, nothing more than a woman with MI6 and deception written in her very blood.

 

            He imagined slippery lies twisting around her veins and arteries, pouring through the valves of her heart, and instinctively rejected the image as being disgusting and unrealistic and somehow wrong. He couldn’t see her as a liar, even if there was every chance she was one – and a gifted one, too, because how else could anyone with integrity survive Christine? He wondered whether she really lived to work the way she seemed to, or whether the fleeting lightness in her eyes when she got texts sometimes (family? Boyfriend? Girlfriend?) meant that there was something else there.

 

            He didn’t wonder whether he was an idiot, putting so much thought into someone who was just Christine’s secretary: he knew he was. He didn’t wonder why he even cared: he knew that the mystery was driving him mad. He had never liked a mystery until he’d successfully unravelled it, carefully, patiently unwound the last scraps of concealment until it lay open before him, explicable and delicate and unlikely.

 

            Miss Wickes was a mystery. A mystery with no first name, no family, no age, no friends, no birthday, and no way of finding out any of those pieces of information – if they even existed, which Adam thought likely. He very much doubted that she went home and plugged herself in at the socket for the night, in order to recharge and face tomorrow with a full battery. And anyway, that would be a boring explanation, boring, and simple, and easy.

 

            Adam had never been much of a fan of easy. Or paperwork, which was how he came to be hurrying along the corridor to Miss Wickes’ office with his latest – and _late_ – report, hoping to get it to her before she left, and, for once, not wondering about her actual life, the one that didn’t involve computers, paperwork, and other unpalatable things.

 

            When he heard laughter coming from Miss Wickes’ office, he started wondering quickly enough, stopped in his tracks by the sound as Miss Wickes came out of her office, face bright with smiling, eyes alight and talking into her phone. “-don’t! I’m leaving work now, I _promise_. Oh, knock it off, Jacinth! You’re not my mother. I’ll be with you in three-quarters- Hang on a minute.”

 

            She’d seen him, and stopped talking, taking the phone from her ear and giving him an enquiring look, but Adam was too shell-shocked to respond. Her black trench coat was unbuttoned, and he could see she was wearing unusually nice high heels and a pretty dress, halfway between silvery and charcoal grey with a blue, pink and pale grey pattern of flowering vines on it, following the lines of her figure closely.

 

            “Uh,” he said with difficulty, trying not to stare. “Report.” He held it out.

 

            “Thanks, Captain,” she said, not as smiley as she had been on the phone but still remarkably cheerful, and reached out and took it. His fingers burned cold where hers had brushed them.  “Just in time. You can ignore the rude email I’ve sent you about the importance of reports now.”

 

            “Are you going out?” he almost blurted (except not, because he was Adam Ross, and he could project an image of sense and normality as well as anyone else, thanks very much.) “Somewhere nice?”

 

            She laughed self-consciously, and looked down at her dress. “Yes. It’s my birthday today, and my parents and my siblings are taking me out.”

 

            “Have a nice time,” he said, and offered her a small smile.

 

            He got a slightly wider one in return. “I will. Have a nice evening, Captain.”

 

            She was halfway down the corridor, and he was rooted to the spot, when he called out to her. “Miss Wickes!”

 

            She turned.

 

            “What’s your name?” he asked, his heart pounding in his ears, telling him _wrong, wrong, wrong_. Bad move, Ross: you’ve offended her now.

 

            But although Miss Wickes’ head was tilted to one side, her frown was questioning, not annoyed, and she did answer, although she left it too long for his imagination’s comfort. “Lorraine. Why?”

 

            “Happy birthday, Lorraine,” he said, and half-smiled again. “That’s all.”

 

            He got a real, broad smile, as wide as the one she’d given the sister she was talking to on the phone. “Thank you, Captain,” she said, and turned and left.

 

            Adam swallowed hard, and went away himself, feeling the knowledge heavy in the pit of his stomach that however many questions he answered about Lorraine Wickes, he would never stop asking more, not now. And now when he looked at the wall behind Christine’s head, it would not be only his own reflection that he imagined walking out onto the ice.

 

            He buried that knowledge deep. No-one had ever claimed that Christine could read minds, but he didn’t intend to be the first to find out that she could.

 


End file.
